AMD's Chief of Client Product Development Joins Recent Exodus from the Company.

Following recent resignations of top engineers and managers from Advanced Micro Devices, the world's second largest supplier of x86 microprocessors lost its general manager responsible for development of client products, which accounted for around 80% of sales of the chip designer.

Chris Cloran left AMD effective Monday to pursue other interests, according to a report in the WSJ. Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of global business units, will serve as interim general manager of the client business while the company is looking forward for a new executive.

The step down of Chris Cloran from AMD is rather hard to overestimate, even though it may not be a major blow for the company. Mr. Cloran joined AMD as vice president of mobile division in November, 2003, and was responsible for all the progress that AMD has achieved on the highly-competitive market of microprocessors for notebooks, which means expanding market share from less than ~1% in 2003 to 17% - 18% in 2011.

Patrick Moorhead, a former AMD executive who now runs the research firm Moor Insights & Strategy, said businesses accounting for about 80% of AMD's revenue had reported to Mr. Cloran.

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Either AMD is on the brink of a total disaster/bankruptcy, Rory Read is doing a full clean-up of the entire company and is in the process of assembling a brand new management team or this is just a coincidence of so many managers getting more lucrative/more opportunistic job offers in the industry. Hmmm....

"The changes come as financial pressures mount on AMD and other suppliers to computer makers. In July, the company reported dismal second-quarter results and said the weakness would continue into the current period as the chip maker is hurt by softening consumer demand for PCs, particularly in China and Europe. Rival Intel Corp., which has generally fared much better lately, also recently warned that third-quarter results would be below expectations.

Mr. Read overhauled AMD's top-management team, which now includes Lisa Su and Mark Papermaster, senior vice presidents who both had lengthy tenures at International Business Machines Corp., as did Mr. Read.

Some managers subsequently left AMD as result of job cuts, while some people in its engineering ranks have taken jobs at competing companies. In a positive development, AMD recently said it hired John Gustafson, a well-known technology leader at Intel, as senior fellow and chief product architect for AMD's graphics business unit." - Wall Street Journalhttp://online.wsj.com/art...04578004391711280364.html

Something tells me Read is just assembling his own new AMD, but investors are being very nervous and cautious given the current state of affairs at the firm.

I sure don't want to see $400 Intel Core i5 or $800 NV GPUs though, so I am hoping this exodus of executives leaving is not a signal that AMD is on its last legs.

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I sure don't want to see $400 Intel Core i5 or $800 NV GPUs though ...

I don't want also, but, as i had told a few times, AMD keeping less than 10% cpu market and inferior cpus is unable to compel Intel to lower its prices. Only the necessity to keep its fab full loaded and ARM/Apple pressure compel Intel to lower its prices.

Sometimes I'm hit by guess that w/o AMD, Intel's prices would have been lower than we see now. That's because if Intel lower its cpu prices further down, it'd kill off AMD completely. Does Intel want it? I'm sure, no, she doesn't.
So, the existence of AMD defines low edge for Intel offering.

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That's a faulty logic. First of all, we have already seen Intel charge us for "K" series unlocked processors. They are already charging us $500+ for 6-core i7 CPUs despite a Quad-Core Q6600 being for sale for ~$300 by August 2007. It's been 5 years now since Q6600 and Intel still has not brought down 3930K to $300 level. All this is because of little competition from AMD.

Intel has been charging $100 extra for HT on the i7 parts vs. i5. Intel almost never charged extra for HT during Pentium 4 days. It was basically given away during a competitive Athlon 64.

Then you have a situation where Intel bribed companies like Dell and HP from not selling AMD CPUs. Doesn't sound to me like a company that cares to have a fair competition (they had to pay millions of dollars in fines in Europe for this after being caught).

Finally, if AMD fails, that means Intel will be split up into 2 companies and both of those can set up a cartel/oligarchy and charge us way more $ for their products and create a "sense of competition".

Then you get to the NV side. GTX280 for $649, 8800GTX Ultra for $830, during 2900XT / 4870 era. Trust me if AMD goes down, that's the worst thing that can happen for us PC gamers.

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You try to attack my logic with a-few-years-ago examples. It's a faulty method, in my sense.

1) A few years ago a) there was no ARM thread and b) Intel had limited production capacity (vs. demand). Now Intel has excellent 22nm yield and so much production capacity that Intel is ready to use it as foundry.
Intel needs keeping it in full load for faster ROI.

2) As to NVidia, it'd be very stupid from her side to increase prices.
Let assume there is no AMD. In this case NV'd swallow AMD's part of market and be happy.
If NV increases prices, it'd lead to shrinking its GPU market and therefore it'd compel game makers to slow down development new games for new DirectX and other features which are specific for NV only and it'd force game makers to put their efforts to Intel gpu-good-enough cpus with huge market.

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This is a changing of the guard that happens in most corporations when a new CEO comes in and needs to make wholesale changes to get the company back on track.

Contrary to the technically inaccurate comments above, (and there are many)... AMD products are not "awful" at all and AMD is not going down. Morons have been predicting the demise of AMD for 40 years and they still make money and keep producing excellent products. In fact AMD wins more new vendor model builds all the time so at least the purveyors of PCs, laptops and e-toys know AMD delivers excellent products even if many PC enthusiasts are clueless.

AMD currently leads in ULV and laptops and has very competitive and price advantaged products in all other PC market segments so the only place they are going is up. VIA and other's have tried the X86 market and AMD is the only one capable of competing and winning against Intel, long term.

What many enthusiasts fail to comprehend is that only 5% of the PC market purchases the top of the line, over-priced speed demon CPU/APUs. The rest of the market buys the products AMD is producing because they deliver all the performance that 95% of consumers need/desire and at great value. Dollar-for-dollar AMD delivers as good or better performance and that is why system builders buy AMD. The only reason Intel is able to maintain it's illegally gotten industry monopoly is because of it's installed base.

The majority of Intel's sales are not the over-hyped, over-priced, top-of-the-line CPUs, they are the bread and butter CPUs sold to mainstream consumers. Having the fastest CPU is primarily for bragging rights as few consumers need these and even fewer are willing to pay the absurd prices. All current X86 CPUs run PC's just fine, contrary to the foolishness spewed by the technically challenged and fanbois.